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rfmcdonaldMy Saturday post regarding the July 20 coup plotters ended up prompting a fair amount of discussion, both here and over at the Head Heeb where Danny Pinkus started an interesting thread about the morally gray areas of 2004's controversial Die Untergang (Downfall). I think, in evaluating said plotters, it's important to note that Germany's conduct of the Second World War didn't suddenly deteriorate from an ideal standard, that in fact in Poland German forces committed innumerable atrocities from the very beginning of the war.
During the First World War, Germany's occupation of western Europe was often rapacious and violent; Germany's war aims in the east were more sweeping, with planned Ukrainian and Polish satellite states and a colonization of the Baltics. From the very start, though, Germany's occupation policies in Poland were of an altogether different nature. How could any German officer stationed in Poland not know this?
Why, I wonder, did these plotters not act in 1939, at the very beginning of the slaughters in Poland? Why not in 1940, before Hitler risked everything with his invasion of France? Why not in 1941, before Hitler dared risk catastrophe with an invasion of the Soviet Union? Simple: In 1939, and 1940, and even in 1941, Germany seemed to be winning. Only when it became evident that the war launched recklessly and brutally by Germany would end by wrecking the country did the plotters try to change things. It wasn't in their interests to tip the boat otherwise. Crimes could be overlooked, even by people who in other circumstances would be appalled by them, so long as things were going well enough for the nation as a whole.
Is this a German thing? No. It's a human thing. How often have people been willing to ignore the suffering of that person in the apartment next door, if ignorance was the only option apart from doing something constructive and actually risking something? It's the sort of thing that we do all the time, genocides or no.
During the 1939 German invasion of Poland, special action squads of SS and police (the Einsatzgruppen) were deployed in the rear, arresting or killing those civilians caught resisting the Germans or considered capable of doing so as determined by their position and social status. Tens of thousands of wealthy landowners, clergymen, and members of the intelligentsia—government officials, teachers, doctors, dentists, officers, journalists, and others (both Poles and Jews)—were either murdered in mass executions or sent to prisons and concentration camps. German army units and "self-defense" forces composed of Volksdeutsche also participated in executions of civilians. In many instances, these executions were reprisal actions that held entire communities collectively responsible for the killing of Germans.
As part of wider efforts to destroy Polish culture, the Germans closed or destroyed universities, schools, museums, libraries, and scientific laboratories. They demolished hundreds of monuments to national heroes. To prevent the birth of a new generation of educated Poles, German officials decreed that Polish children's schooling end after a few years of elementary education. "The sole goal of this schooling is to teach them simple arithmetic, nothing above the number 500; writing one's name; and the doctrine that it is divine law to obey the Germans. . . . I do not think that reading is desirable," Himmler wrote in his May 1940 memorandum. In the same document he promised to deport all Poles to the east. In other statements he mentioned the future killing fields for all Poles in the Pripjet Swamps. Plans for mass transportation and slave labor camps for up to 20 million Poles were made. All should die during the cultivation of the swamps. A bitter note is Hitler`s remark, that they should be exterminated where the Poles in the early medivial age originated.
During the First World War, Germany's occupation of western Europe was often rapacious and violent; Germany's war aims in the east were more sweeping, with planned Ukrainian and Polish satellite states and a colonization of the Baltics. From the very start, though, Germany's occupation policies in Poland were of an altogether different nature. How could any German officer stationed in Poland not know this?
Why, I wonder, did these plotters not act in 1939, at the very beginning of the slaughters in Poland? Why not in 1940, before Hitler risked everything with his invasion of France? Why not in 1941, before Hitler dared risk catastrophe with an invasion of the Soviet Union? Simple: In 1939, and 1940, and even in 1941, Germany seemed to be winning. Only when it became evident that the war launched recklessly and brutally by Germany would end by wrecking the country did the plotters try to change things. It wasn't in their interests to tip the boat otherwise. Crimes could be overlooked, even by people who in other circumstances would be appalled by them, so long as things were going well enough for the nation as a whole.
Is this a German thing? No. It's a human thing. How often have people been willing to ignore the suffering of that person in the apartment next door, if ignorance was the only option apart from doing something constructive and actually risking something? It's the sort of thing that we do all the time, genocides or no.
